Hmm, I made it into the stats page's undeserved master list.
Fair enough, I pointed out my problems with it months ago
myself. I think it's a fault with any popularity-based
metric; very popular people can elevate others with a single
vote. Funny this comes up around the same time as the Google
scam discussion (another popularity metric). If you care,
you can read my older diary
entries.

Yesterday, I was out at dinner with a few friends when I was
asked whether I ever meet any programmers outside of work.
In all honesty, I think it's been 3 times total. I wind up
talking more to writers or architecture professors or
gallery owners. Of course, this was one of the reasons I
moved here instead of San Francisco. I don't like talking
shop much. And it's nice to be in the minority (and know
it's not indirectly my fault that rents have become insane).
I don't mind developers, but it seems that programmers are
often a bit more narrowly focused that other people I meet.
Of course, when I meet any people who could ONLY talk about
abstract art or post-modern architecture, I find them boring
too.

Find is such an incredibly useful command. I honestly don't
know what I'd do without it sometimes. Now it's helping me
to clean up several gigs of month-old files on a disk. If it
weren't for MKS Utilities, NT would be completely useless.
Incidentally, I have become quite peeved at how NT crawls to
a halt whenever there is any serious disk I/O. At least my
UNIX systems get it right.

Halloween turned out to be fun. Went with some friends
visiting from Boston to watch the Village Halloween
Parade. The crowds were reasonable, the weather wasn't
too bad, and the parade itself is always fascinating. I
think they had a good time. It apparently was broadcast on
cable, and I'll see what the tape has on it. It's nice to
live so close to the parade route, except that I always get
to hear the horns of idiots who drive into the city and
expect the traffic to somehow vanish in front of them.

Today has been a bit of a bummer though. November is just a
bleak month, and I'm a bit sad that National Spooky Month is
over. I suppose that listening to Bjork's "Dancer in the
Dark" soundtrack doesn't help... ;)

XML is actually quite cool for similar reasons to those outlined by agntdrake. Here at the
company, we needed to re-engineer our infrastructure to support computer-driven downloads of data, load
balancing, and a bunch of other neat things while maintaining backwards compatibility. We managed to build a
system based on XML in a few months that we have been using ever since. Basically, all of our data is
encapsulated inside of Business Objects which respond to certain methods. Our clients like getting data in XML,
and it even works through firewalls. It was SOAP before there was SOAP. Now we are working on metadata.
Allowing people to get information about the data in our databases is interesting, but it raises all sorts of new
challenges (besides understanding Schema standards).

Why the Web Needs Groves is an article that XML
heads might find interesting. It identifies some serious problems with the current XML programming model (eg,
DOMs) and proposes an interesting solution.

Last night, I alternated talking to tech support and playing Trivial Pursuit. I have to say that I am thoroughly
disgusted with the state of Trivial Pursuit these days. Like Jeopardy, it has become consistently dumber. I am
aware that I have also become smarter over the years, but I think it really has dumbed down. The History
category
consisted almost entirely of questions about America in the 80s and 90s. (Only in America would 1995 be
considered "history"). The Arts and Entertainment section included questions about Melrose Place stars and the
movie Twister. I think one question was about the owner of Cosmopolitan magazine. The winner was
basically determined by lucky rolls of the die. The questions were either not challenging or totally stupid (yes, I
bombed the Melrose Place question). My girlfriend and I are discussing whether we can trade it in for another
version that might be more our speed. And don't get me started on those other game shows...

Everybody's talking about the subway series here. I really couldn't give two monkeys.

"Both phone calls and Post-it notes have a life cycle of their own. They are not mere servants of man, but clever
parasites that use human industry to further their own growth as a species" - Will Self

Sometimes the little things can make a huge difference in the face of scalability. Changed a hashtable to store
64-bit checksums instead of arbitrary strings as a key value (using the first 32-bits as a hash code). It may seem
a
bit silly, but it makes a huge difference when there are 4 million entries of >50 chars. I feel dumb for not
spotting
it
earlier. I know there is a chance of false collision with checksums, but it's extremely low with 64-bit ones.
Especially since the data is split among 800 hash tables of <10,000 entries. Also,
moving logging to different disk spindles than swap can be important, especially if your process consumes a fair
amount of virtual memory. I'm sure some people are wondering what this program is.

I am now reading Extensibility's Schema Adjunct
Framework.
It's
an interesting proposal for including extra information alongside XML schemas (which aren't very extensible) that
can be
used by programs. This is an intriguing concept that might prove rather useful for another project here at work.

Saw on Slashdot that somebody has allegedly posted a P-
solution to an NP-complete problem (clique partitioning).
If it really works out (I'm rather skeptical), it would
also prove that P=NP. Pretty fascinating stuff regardless.
Interested people can check it out at this link.

Monday. I have to work today (Columbus Day), because we only get off when the NYSE is off. You'd think there'd
be a fair amount of them, but not really. And the NYSE is not legally allowed to be closed for 4 days straight, so
the day after Thanksgiving is an official work day. One of the worst perks of the job, but at least I'm not expected to
work 80 hour weeks.

Need to call Concentric and get an update on the DSL situation. It's all rather frustrating.

Well, got the lowdown on the DSL problems. A technician from Covad came over and was unable to get a signal in
my apartment. So he put a tone generator on the line and we went down to look at the box. None of the cables
were reporting the tone, so we looked at a disconnected bunch of cables at the bottom of the box. Ding! Loud and
clear...

So it seems that a Verizon technician perhaps came to install DSL or something else, and purposefully
disconnected my DSL. It's possible he's done it at the NID too, but we couldn't get in there last night. Either he's
an incompetant twit or he purposefully felt like it's okay for me to be axed. Either way, I am royally pissed. I want
James Earl Jones to call me personally with an apology.

It's true that DSL does not have a tone, but any technician should have been able to detect the line was in use.
Especially if they're a DSL technician. Perhaps we can get some accountability back to the technician who did this
(since I know when it occurred), but I'm probably out of luck there.

I've become very cynical about DSL lately. Covad has been atrocious at servicing my trouble ticket. They were
supposed to come out from 4-6PM on Tuesday. The technician showed up at 1:30 and went home since I wasn't
there. Yesterday, he came at 3 when I was told he'd show up after 5:30. Totally @%#@%#@ absurd. I've yelled at
a lot of people over this one. Today, he's scheduled for after 4:10, but I'm sick of taking random times off work just
to have him not show.

What disturbs me is that this company is supposed to be better than Verizon. One can only wonder. I suppose I
could just cancel and get a cable modem, but the thought of dealing with Time-Warner cable has me concerned.
And I don't really want cable TV.